Category Archives: rage virus

It’s finally here. The day I spend all year hiding from, pretending it isn’t coming, hoping that if I ignore it, it’ll go away.

No, it has nothing to do with the Christmas season starting (despite how much my newspaper kids will try to tell you that I’m a Grinch… but that’s really just because I keep unplugging the sound on their computers when they’re blasting Christmas music instead of working—if they played Springsteen Christmas music WHILE they worked, I’d leave them alone), and it has nothing to do with facing a scale after Thanksgiving.

It’s Black Friday.

You’d think that I would love Black Friday. I mean, I’m a champion shopper and, being my mother’s daughter, I’m genetically programmed to sense out any bargains that are occurring within a two-hundred mile radius of wherever I am. (Although I’m not at her level. She’s the Jedi master and I’m just the apprentice. Stores practically pay her to take their merchandise. I still haven’t figured that one out.)

But I don’t.

I fear Black Friday the way normal people fear public speaking and death. The way students with poor grammar who haven’t done their English homework (should) fear me. The way Rosie fears my hairdryer. We’re talking massive, emotionally crippling, panic-attack-inducing fear here.

Why?

Because all humanity disappears as soon as holiday sales begin. It becomes complete and utter anarchy, with people turning into zombies—but not the slow moving, Night of the Living Dead type of zombies. Oh no. That I could handle. I’m talking about the scary, running at full speed, ripping limbs off, and infecting people immediately through any form of contact, 28 Days Later type of zombies.

And I honestly don’t understand it. Why kill each other over a sweater from the Gap? I mean, I don’t even know anyone who wears anything from the Gap anymore, but I know at least three dozen people who would tear someone’s head off and bathe triumphantly in their blood to wrench that sweater away from anyone else who wanted it on Black Friday.

I also don’t understand the people who are willing to wait outside stores in the middle of the night to be there at 4am when they open to get the first pick of the Black Friday deals. The sales last all weekend, people!

And I hate to break it to you, but they’ve got more merchandise in the back. They’re going to restock after the first round of flesh-eating zombies descend on the store. They have to. Otherwise all the other customers would slip in the spilled blood of the fallen.

This year, Hanukkah begins crazily early, so I ALMOST understand why the Jews would be in full-out panic mode to buy presents. Plus, we die if we pay full price for anything. I didn’t think this was true, so I tried paying full price for something one time. My mother appeared out of nowhere and began strangling me. So it’s true. If you pay full price, my mother, or some other Jewish woman (because I’m pretty sure it’s not limited entirely to MY family), will pop out of the woodwork and murder you.

But for all the non-Jews out there, YOU HAVE A MONTH LEFT! If you don’t stuff those stockings now, you STILL HAVE TIME. And there WILL be sales between now and Christmas. Some of them will even be better than Black Friday sales.

All you’re doing by shopping super early is giving your family more time to figure out what you’ve got them. Because children of early-present-buying parents have an almost supernatural ability to figure out what a present is based on examining a gift-wrapped package. It’s true. My brother and I had the senses of a drug-sniffing dog when it was present time. My parents (aka my mother, because my father never has any idea what’s going on present-wise, except for the time he got me a power drill…which I actually was really excited about) thought they were being SO clever by hiding our gift-wrapped presents in suitcases in their closets (which, had we not possessed supernatural x-ray vision to see through to where they were immediately, WOULD have been a great hiding place, because my brother once described my mother’s closet as looking like the shoe room at the Holocaust museum… but scarier and with a LOT more shoes).

But no. Within an hour of discovering our presents, we knew what every single one of them was without even peeling back a single wrapping paper corner. Which we would have done if we had to. I was prepared to go buy a teakettle just to steam the presents open and then re-wrap them. But it was way more fun without unwrapping them. And I’m pretty sure I’m the only person on the planet who can tell the color of the sweater inside a wrapped box.

Then again, it wasn’t exactly a challenge in my family. Because we would be dragged Black Friday shopping every year, forced to pick out things we liked, wrestle them away from the blood-thirsty zombies, then wait in epic line that stretched around and up through three different floors, like the lines for rides at Disney World, while our mother continued decapitating zombies in the store to find more things to buy for herself.

Then we were supposed to pretend we hadn’t seen the purchases that we had just battled to the death for until Hanukkah rolled around.

This year, because I’m in LA for Thanksgiving, I’m hoping that Black Friday will be a less traumatic experience. Maybe it’s all that legal medicinal marijuana, but people in California tend to be more laid back, and I can’t really picture them turning into rage-filled zombies over random holiday presents.

But if I’m not back at school on Monday, I didn’t survive. Luckily, most of the people who fight off those zombies in movies LIVE in LA. So as long as Will Smith didn’t leave town for Thanksgiving, I think I’ll be okay.

And if you’re going shopping today, remember, do NOT start decapitating zombies left and right. To kill them, you have to kill the head zombie.

Meta

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